Educators care deeply about politics. It’s in our DNA - Lily's Blackboard

Educators care deeply about politics. It’s in our DNA - Lily's Blackboard:

Educators care deeply about politics. It’s in our DNA

We care not only because it’s our civic duty to participate in the political process but because we care passionately about our students and about the future of our country. When it comes to our kids, we don’t hold back and we don’t give up.

As I travel around the country it is awe-inspiring to see so many educators and their families fully and actively engaged in the political process—regardless of their preferred candidate.

Now that we’re past Super Tuesday, and as I review the political landscape of Election 2016, I am amazed at what I have seen:Educators in action, holding signs at political rallies, leafleting in neighborhoods, phone banking, caucusing, providing rides to the polls so that others can have their voices heard, too.

I’ve heard and read about educators expressing their views for the candidate of their choice on television, radio and in newspapers. I’ve seen their posts on social media. I’ve watched as educators flank political candidates on stage on TV.

I’ve seen educators talking candidly with candidates from both sides of the political aisle, engaged in an honest dialogue about public education, about our students.

I have seen educators ask the tough questions. And demand answers.

And candidates are listening. I see candidates talking on TV about what they plan to do to ensure all students have an equal opportunity to succeed regardless of ZIP code. I read about them criticizing for-profit charter schools. I’ve reviewed their plans to tackle the school-to-prison pipelineand the college debt crisis. I hear them standing up to the scapegoating of educators and demanding more respectfor the work we do for students every day.

When it comes to advocating for what our students and schools need—and making sure the voices of educators are included in decisions that affect our classrooms—now, more than ever, we are collectively stepping up for our students.

We are the experts. We know what our students need. We are the trusted members of our communities and can advocate unlike anyone else.

When we speak up, people listen—candidates listen. We must use this to our advantage and speak up for our students. We must get involved early and often. And never give up!

Please sign the Strong Public Schools pledge today at www.strongpublicschools.org.

Help keep our students and public education front and center in Election 2016.Educators care deeply about politics. It’s in our DNA - Lily's Blackboard:

Is 'Grit' Doomed To Be The New Self-Esteem? : NPR Ed : NPR

Is 'Grit' Doomed To Be The New Self-Esteem? : NPR Ed : NPR:

Is 'Grit' Doomed To Be The New Self-Esteem?

In just a few short weeks, students in California will be taking high-stakes tests. But the tests won't just cover math, reading and science. Students will also be responding to survey statements like "I usually finish what I start," or "I can do anything if I try."

A group of big-city districts there is among the first to try to measure students' self-control, empathy and other social and emotional skills — and to hold schools accountable for the answers.

The new federal education law requires states to include at least one non-academic outcome in their accountability formulas, so these kinds of tests are likely to become more common nationally. The Nation's Report Card will be asking questions like this next year; so will the international PISA test.

But researchers I've talked to describe a moment of painful irony, where ideas they've advocated for years are catching on and being taken mainstream — before they're ready.

"The enthusiasm is getting ahead of the science," Angela Duckworth, the psychologist and MacArthur Fellow most associated with the concept of grit, told me in May. She has since resigned from the advisory board of the group that's working to test these qualities in California.

The science shows they're important things to teach and learn. Students who believe they can do better with more effort, who try harder, who can delay instant gratification and control their impulses, who take feedback well and know how to work on teams, are likely to become happier, healthier, more successful adults.

What's missing right now, though, is a consensus on how best to cultivate those Is 'Grit' Doomed To Be The New Self-Esteem? : NPR Ed : NPR:

Positive Aura Of Charter Schools Wearing Thin

3/3/2016 – Positive Aura Of Charter Schools Wearing Thin:
Positive Aura Of Charter Schools Wearing Thin

March 3, 2016, 2016 Subscribe

THIS WEEK: Concentrated Poverty In Schools … ADHD Linked To Adult Expectations … More Money For Pre-K … New Teacher Evaluations Fail … Who’s Regulating For-Profit Colleges?

TOP STORY

The Positive Aura Of Charter Schools Is Wearing Thin

By Jeff Bryant

“A new survey of voters across the country reveals growing concerns about charter schools. The poll … found the public … generally opposes expansion of charters. Huge majorities in the poll expressed strong support for a wide range of charter schools reforms that the industry often opposes.”
Read more …

NEWS AND VIEWS

The Concentration Of Poverty In American Schools

The Atlantic

“In almost all major American cities, most African American and Hispanic students attend public schools where a majority of their classmates qualify as poor or low-income … Researchers have found that the single-most powerful predictor of racial gaps in educational achievement is the extent to which students attend schools surrounded by other low-income students.”
Read more …

Could Adults’ Expectations Drive Up ADHD Diagnoses in Kids?

Health Day

“Rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have risen globally, and adults’ unreasonable expectations of young children could be one reason why, researchers suggest … Between 1981 and 1997, U.S. children dedicated more and more hours per week to studying. The biggest change was seen among 6- to 8-year-olds.”
Read more …

Nationwide Bipartisan Trend: State Pre-K Funding Increases

New America Foundation

“Almost two-thirds of states plus the District of Columbia funded pre-K at higher levels last year than the year prior … The spending trend on pre-K among states reflects a positive shift in national attitudes towards the value of early education.”
Read more …

Very Few Teachers Receive Poor Job Ratings, And New Evaluations Haven’t Changed That

The Washington Post

“Are the new evaluations – many of which incorporate test scores or other measures of student learning – any better at identifying poor teaching? Not really … The median proportion of teachers deemed below proficient has ticked up from less than 1 percent to less than 3 percent.”
Read more …

Who’s Regulating For-Profit Schools? Execs From For-Profit Colleges

ProPublica

“College accreditors have come under scrutiny recently for allowing for-profit schools to collect billions in federal aid despite low graduation and high default rates. Accreditors are supposed to be watchdogs for college quality… So who are the people behind the beleaguered accreditor? … Two-thirds of them have worked as executives at for-profit schools while sitting on the council. A third of the commissioners came from schools that have been facing consumer-protection lawsuits, investigations by state attorneys general, or federal financial monitoring.”
Read more …

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3/3/2016 – Positive Aura Of Charter Schools Wearing Thin:

Economists debate the merits of school choice | Harvard Magazine

Economists debate the merits of school choice | Harvard Magazine:

Debating School Choice

 DURING THE U.S. Bicentennial in 1976, Boston Herald American photographer Stanley Forman, NF ’80, snapped a spot photo of a white man assailing a black man with a pole bearing the American flag. While the nation celebrated its founding revolution, Boston in the 1970s was undergoing a different kind of revolution. “The Soiling of Old Glory,” as the image was later titled when submitted for the Pulitzer Prize, shocked Bostonians: the African American was Ted Landsmark, a civil-rights attorney, and his attacker, Joseph Rakes, a protester against the court-ordered desegregation of Boston public schools, which sparked years of racially motivated violence across the city. The desegregation plan eventually proved very successful at shipping students across the city, but measuring busing’s success in improving educational outcomes for students is not as simple.

One goal of social science is to inject rationality into public debates, like the school-choice question, that have been animated by particularist passions and untested social theories. Evidence-based research has produced divergent data on the effectiveness of school-choice systems (which aim to equalize education access by allowing families to choose among schools in their district) over neighborhood-based schools. Under choice systems, families typically compete for seats at the best schools through a lottery, an admissions test, or some other mechanism. Boston’s busing system shared the same goal: delink children’s neighborhoods from the quality of their education and integrate the schools. (The city abandoned much of the system in favor of more neighborhood-based school assignment in 2013.) Choice’s success depends heavily on the characteristics of the cities where it’s implemented and the mechanics of each system—and a good deal more on factors that researchers don’t yet understand. Recent contributions by visiting professor of economics Parag Pathak and Larsen professor of public policy Christopher Avery suggest that even if school choice could work exactly as intended, the policy may harm the disadvantaged students whom it’s designed to help.

A recent paper models a choice system that assigns schools according to families’ preferences, allotting seats at more sought-after schools by lottery. Parents would compete for access to the best schools, so that each school would not only reflect the socioeconomic mix of the community but also become perfectly equal—and average—in quality, Avery explains. But such a result, the model shows, would encourage wealthy families to abandon the system for better-than-average schools that are either private or in another district—a “flight” phenomenon widely documented already.

Pathak and Avery also show a second mechanism—the effect of school quality on home prices—that forces flight not by wealthy families, but by the poor. “When you introduce school choice, school quality compresses…so the house-price distribution compresses as well,” Pathak says, meaning that low-income families are priced out of their own neighborhoods as the schools in their community improve. Home values reflect differences in school quality so faithfully that prices spike and fall along district boundaries. “You see this at the border between [the Boston public school system] and Brookline...if the houses are almost identical, they’re still very different prices because people perceive the schools to be much higher quality in Brookline,” he explains.

In reality, though, researchers know that school choice hasn’t worked this way. Because of variation in families’ school preferences, imperfect information, test-based admissions systems that favor advantaged students, and other frictions, cities that have embraced choice systems are very far from producing perfectly equal schools. In some cases, school lotteries do help Economists debate the merits of school choice | Harvard Magazine:

Closing time: Authorizers, policymakers strive to address charter school shutdowns - Watchdog.org

Closing time: Authorizers, policymakers strive to address charter school shutdowns - Watchdog.org:

Closing time: Authorizers, policymakers strive to address charter school shutdowns

Public charter school authorizers and legislators are working to create policy on charter school closure costs, but some fear regulations could cause smaller schools to never open due to financial constraints.

Indiana is considering a charter reform bill that initially would have required every charter school to have $100,000 in an escrow account upon opening. Legislators later removed the escrow account requirement from the bill.

James Betley, executive director of the Indiana Charter School Board, says having escrow accounts with set amounts and a closure process too prescriptive would eliminate the chance for smaller public charters to open.

“It would make it almost impossible for what we often call the mom-and-pop charters, the homegrown schools to open,” said Betley, adding that some of the best charter schools in his state and elsewhere are smaller and, therefore, don’t have the financial backing from charter school management organizations or education management organizations. “The only schools that would be able to open would be the ones opened by CMOs and EMOs.”

In Florida, legislators are considering a requirement that charter schools post a performance bond each school year equal to a half of the school’s projected operating funds to be used if the charter school defaults on any financial obligations after it closes.

William Haft, vice president of authorizer development at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, told Watchdog.org the handling of the cost of charter schools closing is different by state, but it’s a concern for authorizers nationwide.

“The way it works in terms of handling the costs is, it has not always worked,” said Haft.  “There hasn’t been a plan at the policy level and that’s something authorizers have been struggling with.”

Haft says there are usually three types of charter schools that close: schools that are open for a few years and don’t make it financially; schools that should probably never have been approved in the first place and close within the first year; and schools that close for reasons not related to finances. The first two groups are the ones that create the most headaches for authorizers, policymakers and taxpayers.

“Schools that are closing within the first year — it’s got less to do with the costs and Closing time: Authorizers, policymakers strive to address charter school shutdowns - Watchdog.org:

 

China’s education system leaves students woefully unprepared for the real world - Quartz

China’s education system leaves students woefully unprepared for the real world - Quartz:

China’s education system leaves students woefully unprepared for the real world

 Chinese kids are smart. The kids of Shanghai cleaners outperform those of British doctors and lawyers in math, and Shanghai’s richest students are about three academic years ahead of the developed-country average. Students in the 90th percentile in the US score below the average Shanghai student on a test given to 15 year-olds around the world (pdf).

But tests only tell you so much about Chinese students’ smarts, saysXiaodong Lin, a professor of cognitive studies at Columbia University’s Teachers College. When they come to university in the US, Chinese students tend to struggle with analytical writing, critical thinking, and communication with peers and professors, Lin wrote in the People’s Daily (link in Chinese), the official newspaper of China’s Communist Party.

“While Chinese education has focused more on mastery of knowledge, the American education seems to emphasize how to learn, even though we may not do as a good job as we wish,” she wrote.

Lin has taught college students in the US for 21 years, and told Quartz about she is constantly comparing her US and Chinese students. She has been the faculty adviser for the Chinese Student Association at Teachers College for 10 years, noting that she is “deeply in touch with the community.” She has surveyed other teachers about the differences between American and Chinese students, and writes about her findings frequently.

Global policymakers are equally obsessed with comparative student performance. The OECD gives 15-year-olds around the world a test every three years to track their progress in math, science, and reading; education ministers anxiously await the data and the praise or punishment that follows. But wherever they sit in the rankings, countries struggle to balance increased academic rigor against the reality that the modern workplace demands skills that aren’t reflected in tests.

Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD’s education unit, told Quartz that the rest of the world can learn from the high standards that Chinese schools set for students, as well as the freedom teachers are given to adapt their methods to the subject matter. “They know how to teach,” he told Quartz. “It’s a science for them.” (Shanghai math teachers come to the UK every year to show off their talents.)

Lin agrees that this rigor is good—her Chinese students are better at China’s education system leaves students woefully unprepared for the real world - Quartz:

Dr. Seuss Is the Key to Boosting Graduation Rates - Yahoo News

Dr. Seuss Is the Key to Boosting Graduation Rates - Yahoo News:

Dr. Seuss Is the Key to Boosting Graduation Rates

 It’s a fact: The ability to read, and hit key proficiency benchmarks in elementary school, is the foundation of a quality education. But statistics indicate students in poor communities, and particularly African American and Latino boys, are struggling to build a knowledge base on sand. 

That’s why on National Read Across America Day, the annual celebration of the birthday of author Theodor Seuss Geisel—better known as Dr. Seuss—experts from education policy think tanks to the White House are focusing on literacy as a way to stem the stubborn “graduation gap." Reading is being promoted as a way to end the above-average dropout rate of minority kids compared with whites—and plug the school-to-prisons pipeline. 

RELATED: Can Adding Ethnic Studies to Graduation Requirements Help Stem the School-to-Prison Pipeline?

“It’s one of the early warning indicators,” said Gary Chapman, executive vice president for impact and operations for Communities in Schools, a national network of organizations committed to ending the dropout crisis. by the time they get to high school, “if kids are offtrack in any of those areas, they’re much less likely to graduate.”  

“We find in so many ways it’s their lack of on-level reading abilities that’s driving their lack of interest in school,” he said. Now that the U.S. public school system is majority-minority for the first time in its history—and most of those children receive free or reduced lunches, a sign that their parents are struggling—breaking the link between dropout rates and literacy is crucial, experts say.

Education policy analysts agree that mastering reading by the end of third grade is a critical touchstone for young learners. That grade is the turning point between learning to read and reading to learn. Students who miss that benchmark are up to four times more likely to drop out of high school. Among struggling readers, the dropout rates are twice as high for African American and Latino students as they are for white students.

RELATED: Passing Up Harvard: Qualified Black and Latino Kids Aren't Applying to Top Colleges

While parents and other caregivers are usually a child’s earliest reading teachers—something taken for granted in affluent white communities—the problem of struggling readers is “more an indication of the poverty level that’s Dr. Seuss Is the Key to Boosting Graduation Rates - Yahoo News: 

Why Did $100 Million New Jersey School Reform Fail? | GW Today | The George Washington University

Why Did $100 Million New Jersey School Reform Fail? | GW Today | The George Washington University:

Why Did $100 Million New Jersey School Reform Fail?

Veteran Washington Post reporter who spent four years inside Newark, N.J., reform effort explains.

Dale Russakoff

Author and investigative reporter Dale Russakoff signs copies of her book, The Prize, after discussion sponsored by GSHED. (Logan Werlinger/GW Today)

By Ruth Steinhardt

In 2010, the public school system of Newark, N.J., was in disarray. Only 40 percent of children were reading at grade level, and 53 percent of students would never graduate.

In an attempt to turn the district around, Mark Zuckerberg, the then 26-year-old founder of Facebook, announced on the Oprah Winfrey show that he had donated $100 million to improve schools. He had partnered with Democratic Newark Mayor Corey Booker and Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, two ambitious and charismatic politicians who were rising stars in their respective parties.

“They thought they were going to turn [Newark] into a district of universally high performance and emerge in five years with a model to turn around struggling schools in America,” said investigative reporter and Washington Post veteran Dale Russakoff, whose book “The Prize” chronicles the arc of that ambitious initiative.

Ms. Russakoff, who embedded herself in Newark for four years, spoke Monday at a Q & A and book signing organized by the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development and introduced by GSEHD Dean Michael Feuer.

The problems with these well-intentioned efforts were numerous from the start, Ms. Russakoff said. The first was the project’s unrealistic scope and timeline.

“Changing education in the nation’s cities takes decades, not years, and it takes reckoning with the effects of poverty on children’s lives and minds,” she said. “Mr. Christie and Mr. Booker were thinking in politician time.”

Another issue was that the reform was almost entirely driven by external forces. “[Mr. Zuckerberg] told me later that he thought he was doing what the people on the ground in Newark wanted,” Ms. Russakoff told her Marvin Center audience. “But no one on the ground had been consulted.”

In fact, she said, none of the figures constructing the reform had firsthand knowledge of the area they Why Did $100 Million New Jersey School Reform Fail? | GW Today | The George Washington University:

Netflix Billionaire Reed Hastings' Crusade to Replace Public School Teachers With Computers | Alternet

Netflix Billionaire Reed Hastings' Crusade to Replace Public School Teachers With Computers | Alternet:
Netflix Billionaire Reed Hastings' Crusade to Replace Public School Teachers With Computers
The mogul is ponying up $100 million for high-tech-dominated charter schools.

 When pondering the best way to transform and improve America’s K-12 public schools, do the ideas that first come to mind include: ditching locally elected school boards? Placing grade-school kids in overcrowded computer labs for hours at a time with unproven software and inexperienced teachers? Telling children from poor homes that test scores are the only results that matter? Or putting high-tech entrepreneurs who have financial stakes in the digital tools being road-tested on students on the private boards running those schools? 

These are all cornerstones of the charter school movement that has grown out of Silicon Valley, supported by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has spent more than$400 million to promote technology-driven charter schools. And they’re being championed by Netflix founder-CEO Reed Hastings, who just launched a $100 million foundation where he is likely to become one of America’s highest-profile figures pushing this anti-democratic, tech-centric, corporate-inspired vision to recast America’s public schools.

“The underlying mentality that Hastings shares with Gates is that computers revolutionized commerce, revolutionized business, revolutionized manufacturing, so now why can’t computers revolutionize education,” said Anthony Cody, a retired high school teacher from Oakland, Calif. and critic of billionaire-led charter schools and their high-tech takeover of the learning process. “In their minds, it is inevitable that it will. The only question is what will be the delivery method.”

The charter school movement emerged in the 1990s as a way to innovate in individual public schools. But over the last decade the movement has evolved into a franchise-dominated industry, where a tight circle of interrelated for-profit and non-profit players are doing everything they can to privatize public education. Across the country, super wealthy foundations—including the Walmart-backed Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—have put more than $1 billion into creating 6,700 charter schools. Besides Gates, there may be no figure more widely identified with the computers-will-fix-everything mindset than Northern California’s Hastings.   

Hastings, 55, has been pushing charters for two decades. Last winter, he made national news when he gave the keynote address to the California Charter Schools Association’s (CCSA) convention and said locally elected school boardsNetflix Billionaire Reed Hastings' Crusade to Replace Public School Teachers With Computers | Alternet:

You Can't Measure Grit with a Standardized Test | Inverse

You Can't Measure Grit with a Standardized Test | Inverse:

You Can't Measure Grit with a Standardized Test
"Not everything that counts can be counted."

 To be successful, students must have build up a certain amount of grit, that mixture of resolve and courage we all think we have to deal with tough situations, but how schools are measuring grit and other emotional skills is actually quite flawed, says the person who literally wrote the book on grit.

Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2013 MacArthur “Genius,” is speaking out against the tests currently being rolled out in nine California school districts as early examples of what socio-emotional examinations will look like.

“I do not think we should be doing this; it is a bad idea,” Duckworth told The New York Times on Monday. She recently resigned from the board of the group spearheading the changes in California, saying she couldn’t support the tests that are being implemented.

Current students in the trial districts fill out surveys asking questions like how prepared they think they are when they go to school and if they think its more important to be talented to hardworking. The higher the “grit” — the ability to work towards long-term goals through hard work and self-control — the higher the score. When the new regulations are fully implemented, the plan is for social-emotional learning to count for 8 percent of the school’s overall performance score.

While Duckworth has extensively researched the benefits of grit, she argues that it is not something that can be whittled down into standardized testing. In a paper she co-wrote University of Texas at Austin David Yeager, Duckworth argues there is no reliable way to test for grit on mass scale; doing so could actually make things worse for students.

While non-cognitive qualities like grit and self-control are proof-positive predictors of academic, social, and economic well-being, there are serious limitations to self-reported questionnaires. These include a chance for misinterpretation or lack of insight by the survey taker, and group biases (e.g. saying what seems like the right answer) that affect normal responses. The researchers emphasize that while tests on grit have proven correct in scientific settings, that doesn’t mean they would work on a large scale. If anything, a better chance of measuring non-cognitive abilities would be to issue a wide variety of tests.

“We share this more expansive view of student competence and well-being, but You Can't Measure Grit with a Standardized Test | Inverse:

Activists urge Senate not to confirm Obama’s pick for new education secretary - The Washington Post

Activists urge Senate not to confirm Obama’s pick for new education secretary - The Washington Post:
Activists urge Senate not to confirm Obama’s pick for new education secretary

 Dozens of students, parents, educators and activists are urging the U.S. Senate not to confirm John King, President Obama’s choice to succeed Arne Duncan as education secretary, because he pushed education policies when he was education commissioner of New York State that they say were “ineffective and destructive.”

The Senate education committee held confirmation hearings last week and his confirmation by the panel and the full Senate is expected this month. But a growing number of King critics are speaking out, including a few school boards in New York, which passed resolutions against his confirmation. Now a letter signed by a long list of individuals and organizations warns senators not to be “misled” by King’s “vague promises to do better.” Signatories include education historian and activist Diane Ravitch, educator Deborah Meier, and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis.

[Why the new U.S. education chief is a lightning rod]

King was education commissioner in New York from 2011 until December 2014, when he left under pressure and it was announced that he was moving to Washington to become No. 2 to Duncan. When Duncan left his job at the end of last year, King took over as acting education secretary, and Obama recently sent his name up to the Senate for confirmation as the official education chief. During the hearing, senators managed to avoid asking him any direct questions about his difficult tenure as New York’s education boss.

[U.S. legislators give Obama’s education pick an astounding pass]

During that tenure, King led a series of highly controversial school reforms that included a new teacher evaluation system using student standardized test scores that critics say is nonsensical  (for example, art teachers were evaluated by student math test scores). His oversight of the implementation of the Common Core standards and aligned Pearson-designed standardized tests was considered such a disaster that New York. Gov Andrew Cuomo wrote in a letter to top state education officials that “Common Core’s implementation in New York has been flawed and mismanaged from the start.”  King’s testing policies led to the creation of an opt-out movement in New York, in which 20 percent of test-takers statewide sat out the tests this Activists urge Senate not to confirm Obama’s pick for new education secretary - The Washington Post:

Lamar Alexander’s ESSA: Room for John King, But Not Opting Out | deutsch29

Lamar Alexander’s ESSA: Room for John King, But Not Opting Out | deutsch29:

Lamar Alexander’s ESSA: Room for John King, But Not Opting Out

On February 22, 2016, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) was among a number of legislators participating in the National Governors Association (NGA) Winter Conference.

  

Lamar Alexander

At minute 1:05:30, Alexander reflects on “fixing No Child Left Behind” and advises governors, “You don’t put people in a corner.”

What came immediately to my mind was the corner that Alexander’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) puts both parents and governors in by its 95 percent testing requirement.

I call it “Alexander’s ESSA” because he is the visible legislator steering that ship– and the person who has already declared that he will see to having Obama’s pick for US secretary of education confirmed. As Daarel Burnette II of EdWeek reports:

[Alexander’s] speech [to NGA] at the JW Marriott came just days before the Senate education committee is to hold a confirmation hearing for acting U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr., who President Barack Obama has nominated to be secretary. “I urged him to appoint somebody and I told him I’d make sure he was confirmed,” Alexander said.

According to ESSA, each year, 95 percent of all enrolled students in grades 3 through 8 and one grade in high school in public schools in each state receiving Title I funds are required to complete nationally recognized standardized tests, and states are required to demonstrate how they will include the results of the testing in their accountability plans.

There is some nonsense language about states’ not blaming ESSA for their opt out policies, but the truth is that via ESSA, the federal government is intending that there be no opting out of the federally mandated testing associated with Title I.

In other words, when it comes to opting out of federally mandated testing, Alexander’s ESSA puts governors and parents in the corner.

If states do not meet the federally required 95 percent of students tested, then it will Lamar Alexander’s ESSA: Room for John King, But Not Opting Out | deutsch29: